The talented Mrs Ripley

SHE'S best known as an actress in shows such as Cold Feet and ­Moving On but Fay Ripley is ­cooking up a storm as a foodie.

SHE'S best known as an actress in shows such as Cold Feet and ­Moving On but Fay Ripley is ­cooking up a storm as a foodie.

The 45-year old mum of two isn’t just a famous face jumping on another bandwagon to promote themselves though. Instead, Fay is a real life domestic goddess, who is incredibly confident about the food she makes and this year will publish her second cook book.

Her brownies even beat the multi-Michelin starred Gordon Ramsay on his show The F Word.

Not bad for an untrained cook, whose schoolmates thought was strange because of what was in her lunchbox.

Fay, who narrates new cookery series Perfect on the Good Food channel, revealed: “My parents split up when I was two.

“My father married a German woman and my mother married an Italian. I grew up in the 70s when other people were still having sugar sandwiches for their packed lunch and I was having this European diet like salami, cream cheese or strudels.

“People used to look at my lunchbox like I was a weirdo.

“It was just not quite what people were used to. I just had different tastes at an early age.”

Although we know her as an actress, it seems in the future she will become better known for her recipes.

Her first cookbook Fay’s Family Food won the Mumsnet cook book of the year award in 2011, which she claimed felt like winning an Oscar.

Her second book, What’s For Dinner, will be published next month.

There is talk of her following Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson and Sophie Dahl with her own television show.

Fay said: “I have been a bit shy of doing that but yes, I will probably do my own show. I wanted to establish myself in this world. I’m not trained. Life has trained me.

“There aren’t enough women doing food shows. Hello? We are doing all the groundwork at home.

“All these boys with their chef hats on. It’s a really male-dominated world.

“I’ve been a guest and cooked on a lot of shows and what I found was a real cynicism because I’m a woman.

“There was a sense you are going to be underwhelming.

“The way I get out of that is I’m super enthusiastic and super confident about the food I cook.”

She sure is. While Gordon Ramsay’s celebrity challenges on The F Word usually end in him winning the taste test, he came a cropper when faced with Fay’s brownies.

She said: “Gordon hates me a little bit because I beat him and he’s got all these Michelin stars. He wasn’t best pleased.”

Fay is full of glee when recounting the story. Despite being a celebrity and meeting dozens of famous actors and actresses, it’s only when she meets a chef that she turns to jelly.

But she didn’t always love food like she does now and revealed that she became neurotic about it.

She said: “My relationship with food has changed over the years. I’ve courted with food, I’ve pretended to be grown up in my early 20s with food and when Cold Feet came about I began eating in posh restaurants and forgot how to cook.

“Then I met my fiancé, who then became my husband, and you get very nesty so I got back into the kitchen.”

After marrying Australian actor Daniel Lapaine in 2001, the couple had two children, daughter Parker, now nine and son, Sonny, five.

Fay said: “The point it turned to being a keen cook who likes food was when I had children.”
It didn’t go smoothly though.

“When my daughter Parker was very young I become pretty obsessive and extremely neurotic about what I fed her,” she said.

“The spoon had to be organic, let alone the food on it. I wasn’t relaxed about it at all.

“I lost my love, in a way, for food in the early period of weaning her because I was so concentrated on not getting anything wrong. I forgot to eat well myself.

“I stopped entertaining. I stopped caring about any other form of food.

“Then little by little I realised what the hell I was doing and the madness of it and that I’d pass that on to my child.

“All I was trying to do was be healthy but I was being completely the opposite.”

As her love of food came back, she turned to the cook books she’s avidly bought over the years and that line her shelves but realised she would only use one or maybe two recipes from each book. Which, when they cost £20-a-pop, felt like a rip off.

She said: “I wrote my first because, honestly, I wanted that cook book. I wanted to feed all the family, not just babies or grown-ups and I couldn’t find the recipes.”

Fay revealed all her deep memories involve food from birthdays to holidays. She used to travelwith her businessman dad around France and her favourite meal as a six-year-old was Salad Niçoise.

But she also loved her grandmother Ivy’s solid British cooking and when deciding on recipes, dipped into family ones, ones adapted from cook books she’d bought and ideas she’d picked up from friends.

There are three rules. They have to be delicious, not have too many ingredients and shouldn’t take too long.

Good advice then for her new show as she oversees the second series of Good Food’s Perfect where an array of top level chefs go head to head to create flawless culinary masterpieces.

Chef pairings include Thomasina Miers and Valentine Warner, who will be cooking up a Mexican feast, while Ching-He Huang and Nic Watt will compete to create the perfect Asian banquet.

Jo Pratt and Mark Sargeant will be dishing up a romantic dinner, while Matt Tebbutt and Paul Merrett will be immersing themselves in the most uplifting comfort food.

The dishes will then be judged by food enthusiasts with an interest in the selected cuisine.

With 2012 already shaping up to see Fay as a writer and a telly presenter, it seems she has on quite a few hats. And she’d liked some more.

She said: “I’m an actress. At some point will the scales tip in the direction of food? I don’t know.”

Her words speeding up as she opens up to exactly what she wants in life, Fay said: “I also want to open a shop, a restaurant and I want to be an interior designer and build houses.

“In fact I want to build an empire.”

Given her enthusiasm as she laughs at what she’s just blurted out, you don’t doubt she’ll do it.